Traceroute is an application that allows you to monitor the network path taken to reach the specified IP destination. You may be familiar with this in Windows (command: tracert.exe) and in Linux (command: traceroute). The downside of these default applications is that they only run the trace once from source to destination. If you need to constantly monitor the path taken by packets to reach their destination I would suggest the following applications for Windows & Linux….

Ping Plotter, www.pingplotter.com is a Windows graphical route plotter. It is available as a Freeware, Standard or Professional version.

The Freeware edition provides a basic interface as seen above, however the Standard & Professional edition offer more functionality such as alerts and route change information/alerts.

mtr provides the same function, but for Linux command line as seen here:

mtr can be installed with the following command in CentOS:

# yum install mtr

You can initiate an active trace to a host with the following command: